Re: Good resource for beginning programmers

From: "Don Marang" <donald.marang@xxxxxxxxx>

To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 01:14:24 -0500

I have been intrigued by these free MIT offerings for some time. I enjoyed
several of their Astro Physics lectures. I have also been putting off
learning Python and brushing up on Javafor about 6 months. I am an
Electrical Engineer and do not consider myself a beginner programmer.
However, I have no real course before in Object Oriented Programming. I did
once teach a bunch of Cobol Mainframe programmer's OO in a Distributed
Computing Environment. That was almost 17 years ago, and I am sure Java has
changed.

I should do this as well. I could probably benefit from an introductory
course, from a MIT view, to assure the proper structure. Of course, I will
not need 3 or 4 lectures to understand loop constructs.

Don Marang

There is just so much stuff in the world that, to me, is devoid of any real
substance, value, and content that I just try to make sure that I am working
on things that matter.

Hi, folks,
Thought I'd share this. I don't know how many of you may know this
but MIT puts a bunch of their courses on a site that they make
available to everyone called OCW which is short for Open Courseware.
I've found a nice link in this site to their Introduction to Computer
Science and Programming course which was taught in fall 2008. It's a
whole semester's worth of lectures, assignments, readings and so
forth. Most of us probably can't afford to take time off our jobs and
attend MIT but, we can still get the benefit of some of their excelent
curriculum this way. I think it beats just reading a book and
learning that way. Posting the link below. The language they use for
this course is Python. I'm actually planning to put c++ on pause for
a while while I take this course as time allows since Python appears
to be a much quicker way to learn programming. If anyone wants to
join me for the occasional study session, e-mail me privately and we
can help each other out from time to time. Probably watch two hours
worth of lectures on a weekend night or something like that. And yes,
if anyone's curious, they do have a c++ introductory course there but
it's all lecture notes and pdf's. The lecture notes look like they
don't do squat for you if you didn't attend class as really good
lecture notes written by any self-respecting instructor should in
order to motivate you to show up for class. The cs course with Python
has all the bells and whistles short of truly being able to enroll and
have the instructor available.
Here is the link:
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/
Regards,
Alex M
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